The military campaign has “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II,” the report quoted one source as saying. The source, hardly some raving left wing activist, are experts cited in one of the most respected news organizations in the world, The Associated Press.
Nor did South Africa seek to elide or obfuscate the atrocity of Hamas’ attack on Israel, or the ongoing threat to Israel: In fact, the South African document explicitly condemns the Oct. 7 attack, and notes the ongoing rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.
It goes on to quote statements from top Israeli officials, like President Isaac Herzog, stating that “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” making no distinction between civilians and Hamas fighters. Israel’s minister of defense, in the days after the attack, called for a “complete siege,” adding “there will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.” He said that in fighting Hamas the country faced “human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A politician tweeted that the objective was “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” The minister of agriculture said Israel was “now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
These are serious charges that will take years to investigate and untangle. The bar to proving that the Israeli government has engaged in genocide is very high, and appropriately so. It is the most heinous crime a nation can commit, and there is special resonance given that the term genocide was coined by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, during the Holocaust to give a legal definition to the slaughter and ensure it never happened again.
Israel mounted a vigorous and detailed defense, arguing that the statements South Africa cited were not official government policy in prosecuting the war. (The Hebrew-speaking American journalist Yair Rosenberg argued in The Atlantic that some of the statements from Israeli officials quoted in the South Africa referral have been taken out of context, truncated or mistranslated.) Hamas has explicitly and repeatedly stated it seeks to eradicate the state of Israel. Israel argues that Hamas is the force that would commit genocide if given the chance, and its military campaign in Gaza against Hamas is one of self-defense. The court did not order Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, presumably indicating that its battle there is legal and legitimate in principle.
